


aspirations

by asatronomical



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Bad Parenting, But also, M/M, Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) Compliant, Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) Fix-It, Panic Attacks, Post-Operation Pitfall (Pacific Rim), Pre-Movie: Pacific Rim (2013), because we like happy endings in this house, but in 8 pages so don't worry it's not too long a ride, covers hermann's life from childhood to post-uprising, hermann has ataxia, it's very nice at the end just hang in there!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-13 14:37:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18470983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asatronomical/pseuds/asatronomical
Summary: Forty-seven years of Hermann Gottlieb's life, told through his aspirations and through their fallout.





	aspirations

**Author's Note:**

> aspiration (n.)-  
> 1.) the hope or ambition of achieving something  
> 2.) the action or process of drawing breath

When Hermann Gottlieb was 6 years old, the Shuttle-Mir program started. It consisted of American and Russian astronauts collaborating to prepare a joint project, something called the International Space Station. The young boy had never left his hometown, let alone Germany (a country that hadn’t gone far beyond the ground itself), but the moment he heard the first rumblings of the project, he felt that he was already in the stars.   
Hermann wanted to become an astronaut.   
His family never did anything to dissuade him of the notion, given that he’d already mastered fourth-grade math and was quickly gaining interest in algebra, and they were both taken aback and amused by his prodigal skill. In fact, they gave him more and more books to read about space and its mechanics, the music of the vast emptiness that Hermann knew was calling his and only his name. But the books weren’t enough. He’d sneak downstairs at midnight with his sister to watch reruns of Cosmos that she would tape during the day, trying desperately to keep his eyes open by keeping his fingers busy tapping out every prime number he could remember on the couch cushions. His sister barely watched, telling him that Sagan’s voice sounded like a lullaby, but to Hermann it felt exactly the opposite. It was a call to action.  
As his parents showed him off to more and more teachers and he climbed grade levels instead of jungle gyms, he learned that he was odd. He didn’t much care, but it seemed to matter a whole lot to everyone else. He studied space and numbers and German and history books and learned a lot of other things outside of books. He saw physics in action when his older classmates pelted him with his own textbooks, biology in the bruises around his eye. Words he’d never heard and that he didn’t think he should repeat. He learned that people fly when they are kicked by bigger people, and that things besides red and blue can make purple. Yellow was not a primary and unmixable color when fists were involved. You could make it quite easily.  
As he spent more and more hours sitting outside the principal’s office while his parents murmured about what they should do with their gifted punching bag, he swung his feet above the floor in rhythm with the ticking clock, counting, counting, counting down from the trillions. Only that many seconds, he decided, until liftoff, until he could see the stars in person, the quiet, bright, secretive creatures that talked in numbers if you listened well, the ones that never shouted or scolded, the masters of the universe. _Forty-eight billion, three hundred and fifty seven thousand, seven hundred and ninety-two, ninety-one, ninety_ seconds. He just had to count.   
The door opened. The countdown paused until 3:12pm, when he sat in the kitchen as his sister recorded another episode. _Forty-eight billion, three hundred and fifty seven thousand, seven hundred and eighty-nine…_

When Hermann was 16, his countdown had long since ended and restarted and then eventually stopped altogether in favor of more immediately important things. He was starting college in two days. He wanted to be a mathematician.  
In the past ten years, people had never stopped caring about his oddness, but Hermann had gotten better at disguising himself. Not the oddness, just himself. Years of being the Gottlieb family’s prodigy child, the introduction at parties, “Das ist mein Sohn Hermann, er ist sehr talentiert” had shaped him strangely. It was as if he was to be the epitome of pride and at the same time the butt of most jokes. He had not yet figured out, despite years of trying, how to tell whether people were laughing with or at him, and tended to assume the latter. That, combined with an epically groomed fear of failure instilled by being labeled “gifted” for the entirety of his conscious life, taught him the important and oft-used lesson of how to become utterly invisible in any situation. The majority of the trick was to act like you belonged, but not like you mattered in the slightest. He’d gotten it down to a science.  
His graduation was in record time for his school. He managed to slip out of the ceremony early.  
The university application process was rather different for the 15-year-old. It was less a question of where he would be accepted, and more of what he wanted to study. He picked the study of mathematics, heading to TU in Berlin. His days of dreaming to be a spacefarer were over. Space was solitary, but that meant that all eyes would be on him. He’d much rather be a conduit for the things he loved, a sort of translator for the universe. A friend of the stars, still, but a friend on the ground. He would study their music secondhand, read the transcriptions of their sonatas, maybe someday record them himself.   
Nevertheless, he had a roommate for a duration of nine days, two meetings with the head of his residence hall, and four ruthless “pranks.” And then he had a room to himself. And that was what he wanted. Hermann only wanted, at that point, to be left alone.

At 26, Hermann’s world had been turned upside down and shaken thoroughly. Two years earlier, Trespasser had made land. Since then, all sorts of monsters, questions, and changes had fallen through the breach in the Pacific. Hermann had, for the first time in more years than he cared to remember, someone he might dare to term an acquaintance. Dr. (Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr.) Newton Geiszler, an MIT graduate, fellow child prodigy, unparalleled biologist, and self-proclaimed kaiju groupie.   
His first communication was for scientific purposes. As a mathematician and physicist, he was instantly drawn to analyze the breach, and Dr. Geiszler, despite being in a different field entirely, seemed to know more about it than most anyone else on the forums he could find. Additionally, for Hermann’s own numerical faith, a biologist was useful to talk to, because he could get the dimensions of the beings that crawled through and analyze them for patterns. The Fibonacci sequence, primes, the golden ratio, anything. Nothing had turned up yet. But Hermann had faith, as he always had, in numbers. In the extraordinary mathematical music of the stars to speak of truth hidden in plain sight.  
He expected a professional response, and instead got one in a mix of English and German, riddled with slang and a few expletives in both languages. Dr. Geiszler was clearly a passionate man. Hermann was most surprised to see that Dr. Geiszler had not only researched him, but that they shared odd similarities. They were both German-born and had both attended college early. Hermann’s heart had leapt at the message, but he had no explanation as to why. Nonetheless, he recognized that Geiszler might be a potential assistant in the coming days, and more and more monsters, now termed kaiju, poured from the breach, so he continued their chain of emails.  
Thanks to Dr. Geiszler’s- Newton’s, as he’d urged Hermann- prodding, the two became something akin to what Hermann might term friends. Geiszler was clearly keen to accept this, calling him “dude” and “buddy” more times than he found entirely acceptable in communication that he at least pretended was professional, but the tipping point happened when, one night, Newton sent an email, clearly tipsy, that could best be described as an emotional rampage. His languages were muddled and sometimes entirely incomprehensible, but it seemed that he was reminiscing. At first, it seemed that he was talking about his department’s recent work and the fact that he had been excluded from it, a common subject of recent conversations, but then it shifted unexpectedly to the man’s own experience in college and then even in earlier education. It was, Hermann couldn’t help but notice, painfully similar to his own. Lonely. Newton ended the email with a “Soooo, how a bout you?”  
It was three in the morning and Hermann was utterly spent grading term papers. He replied.  
And so they began to bond in a less professional manner, sending emails about daily inconveniences, musical tastes, fashion choices, and even Newton’s recent spree of body modifications. He had tattooed kaiju on his forearms. The healing, as Dr. Geiszler put it, “is a bitch.” Hermann found himself consulting search engines on tattoo care and sending his new pen pal links. Telling him to take care of himself in a way he disguised as a command, shifting the responsibility for Geiszler’s safety to the man himself, but that actually meant, to Hermann, something frighteningly fond.  
The kaiju were decimating cities. The breach’s maw hadn’t closed. Hermann’s own father, whom he hadn’t spoken with since college save a curt email each birthday, had begun work. The old man was eccentric, but this idea was wild, by seeming everyone’s account.  
Lars Gottlieb had thought up (probably while stinking drunk, Hermann decided) an idea to build enormous robotic shells, termed Jaegers - hunters - that would attack the kaiju and fight them head-on. The idea seemed heartily American, but not out of character for the confrontational, eccentric man Hermann remembered.  
Hermann, despite his fascination with the kaiju, wanted nothing to do with the project. At first. But, in talking to Newton, he had discovered an odd, nostalgic enthusiasm. Something he hadn’t felt in years. It was the same unnameable, unplaceable feeling that drove him towards the stars. He wanted to see it all firsthand. He wanted to see it up close. He wanted to be a spaceman, just like he had when he was younger. And now the stars were a great deal closer, and he had his very own interpreter.  
He confessed this to Newton and the man would not stop talking about it afterwards. While Geiszler thrived in a lab, he espoused Hermann’s ability to succeed in the program (which Hermann considered utterly unfounded, given that they hadn’t even exchanged phone numbers, let alone met in person) and pushed him to send in an application.  
Geiszler had a way of getting under his skin.  
Hermann, at the age of 26, decided that he wanted to be a Jaeger pilot. He sent in his application. He was accepted within 23 hours, and five minutes after receiving the email informing him of this, he got another from his father.  
“Herzliche Glückwünsche. Ich bin stolz auf die Zusammenarbeit mit Ihnen.”  
One from Geiszler quickly followed.  
“I’m so proud of you, dude!”

When Hermann was 28, he initiated his first drift. His training had prepared him well, and he was thought to be a good candidate due to his intelligence. His mind was strong, the testing crew said.  
This provided some explanation, in theory, for the partner he was given: a 6’5’’, stocky meat wall of a man named Brutus Burns. American. Harsh and gruff in tone, brash and boisterous personality. An ex-navy man. A telling anecdote that stuck in Hermann’s mind was when once, at lunch on a dare, he’d lifted a table with someone still sitting at it, and upon putting it down, dropped it on said person, who’d fallen off. Hermann was clearly to be the brains to his brawn.  
They were given a Mark I Jaeger so new that it didn’t yet have a name. The pilots had taken to calling it Rustbucket, despite the fact that it was still spotlessly polished. It was imposing, metallic, and thrilling.  
Hermann walked in trying to contain joy that he’d waited years to find. As he strapped himself into his suit, feeling the various hinges and clamps tighten and form a second skin, he felt like he was six again. Staring up at the sky, wondering what the stars sounded like. How eternity, the cosmos felt between his fingers. He wished he could go back 22 years and tell the young boy so desperate to live in his own head and not in the world that it felt like a jaeger pilot’s suit, like metal and mesh and freedom.  
He stepped into the room with Brutus feeling something new and strange and wonderful. Confidence? He thought of Newton as he walked through the doors and let attendants attach him to a maze of wires. How he couldn’t wait to tell him what the drift felt like.  
The drift. Suddenly, Brutus was standing beside him, imposing and large. At that precise moment, a tiny dagger of fear embedded itself into his stomach. His guard went back up instinctively.  
The attendants shouted that they would initiate the drift. One dagger became ten, and then fifty as his vision swam and reduced to a single point _he didn’t want to let-_  
being six again was wonderful until you remembered how small a six-year-old really was and Brutus was so large and brash and loud but it wasn’t Brutus anymore it was a schoolyard bully with his grubby, huge hands in Hermann’s brain invading solace and destroying safety he couldn’t _do_ that he had to drift he had to let him in but he _couldn’t_ because couldn’t they all see? Couldn’t everyone see the mean glint in the boy’s eyes the knuckles cracked the grin that called him weak and useless and ridiculous that made every step into a joke? Could they see the teachers standing in front of him handing him a failure and his parents shouting and now Hermann was on the floor trying to count the floorboards and the slats under the bed and the cracks in the ceiling while a chorus of people turned their eyes away counting louder and louder and louder maybe if he reached a million they would listen they would see he really was  
worthless he was worthless he had always been worthless he  
felt his body hit the ground and the thump echoed as a cruel laugh from his father’s lips.  
When Hermann awoke, he couldn’t move his legs. _Failure._  
Over the course of the next week, Hermann learned more about what had happened. He remembered only a feeling, one he didn’t want to dwell on, but the doctors’ discussions and his one visitor- his head trainer- brought back more and more. He’d chased a RABIT and overloaded the PONS system. They’d have to alter it. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, they reassured him.   
Hermann asked when he could try again. The cagey, apologetic response was that he couldn’t.  
And then the doctors started to swarm and it was days and days of being unable to move and then unable to hold still. His whole body shook. His legs didn’t respond.  
At the end of another week, he was discharged with a cane, meager compensation, and an ataxia diagnosis. Brain damage. He was lucky, at least, that the injuries weren’t physical. Brutus would have a permanent scar. Hermann tried very hard not to think about it, but he stopped by his room one night to offer an apology to the unconscious man.  
The words still haunted him. His brain, the thing that had put him in the spotlight, set him free, made him special (that sounded stupid and selfish, but it was all he could say, and wasn’t it true? He was special. Once.) was broken. It couldn’t be fixed. The evidence was left behind in his shaking body. The one leg he could use got sore quickly and the other didn’t bear weight. His hands shook. He couldn’t write, he could barely type.   
He’d received an email from Newton. Three emails, to be precise, in varying degrees of worry and clarity. He’d heard about the accident. He wanted to make sure Hermann was alright. Hermann tried to type a response (he was days late, Newton must be worried). His hands were shaking too violently to get beyond a greeting. He closed the laptop lid as slowly as he could because he knew if he didn’t, he’d smash the screen, and it would be intentional.   
Newton deserved a stronger, more reliable person than him.  
How stupid he was to think he could see the stars. At the end of the day, he was just another child, another foolish man entertaining dreams that only angels could afford.  
Hermann had decided not to want at all.

By the time Hermann was 36, he had scraped together enough of a want to get a position coding jaegers, a position in the research division, and to want his lab partner to shut up. He found he could be quite open about the latter.  
Dr. Newton Geiszler was far more insufferable in person, as they’d both learned a few weeks after the jaeger incident when he came to visit and promptly misspoke (“Jesus, dude, you use a cane like I did when I was seven years old, did no one teach you how to use that thing?”) for which he’d offered many apologies in another late-night email. Hermann had been too embroiled in his own worries to respond, and it took about a year for them to bring it up again, but now they got on decently.  
That being said, their new common language was arguments. Arguments about the music, the weather, lab safety, Hermann’s clothes, Newton’s (lack of) professionalism. Hermann had submitted 37 complaints, only 9 of which had been addressed (they decided his complaints didn’t merit a response afterwards. Frankly, they might not have been wrong. But Geiszler should be wearing a shirt at all times.).   
Sometimes, though, their arguments were about something much more important, with undeniable gravity: the end of the world. The kaiju were only pouring in faster, and Geiszler- “Newt,” as he’d practically begged Hermann to call him - had an idea Hermann assumed he could only have found while inspecting the interior of his own backside: drifting with a kaiju to find the answers. Hermann could find it with numbers. He couldn’t easily do so, but he could do so, and god knows it was a better plan than Newt’s idiotic one, but the man with six doctorates that he must have traded his common sense for was convulsing on the floor and bleeding from the eye and nose soon after fresh faces entered the base. Hermann, terrified for reasons he didn’t want to explain for the safety of his coworker, did his best to handle the situation and brought the marshal in, expecting Pentecost to berate Geiszler and explain, once again, the importance of Hermann’s work.  
That was not the case.  
Instead, the Marshal told him to try again, a task that required him to go into a hive of criminals, confront a dealer of kaiju remains, and, most infuriatingly, repeat the process that had left him physically and emotionally shaken and terrified to the point that he’d clung to Herman the second he got close. How no one could see this was a terrible idea, Hermann didn’t know, but since anger seemed to produce no change, Hermann let go of that one final rope holding him above the pool of fear.  
And then Newt was alone in Hong Kong during a kaiju attack and Hermann felt a want he couldn’t explain.  
Rather, a want that he’d been able to explain for a while, but that he really, really hadn’t wanted to.  
He wanted Newt to be safe. He had to admit it.  
The world was really ending.

Newt’s hands were around his neck. _But it wasn’t really Newt, it was the Precursors, damn him for letting Newt go for a second._ Something was wrong in his eyes. His glasses were gone but there was something worse missing, the spark of idiocy in his eyes, the reckless, wild _stupidity_ , his round cheeks and soft edges were gone and replaced with something chiseled from concrete, his dress sense had gotten _better_.  
He had lost everything that Hermann had outwardly mocked and it made him miss the man so _much_ , so unexplainably much, so _irreplaceably_. Newton was irreplaceable. No one could fill his shoes. Even the Precursors had picked new ones.  
“He is not strong enough, _none of you are strong enough_!” The screams, the awful sounds that couldn’t have come from his throat were drowned out by the realization of the feeling of malice in his head, the terrible edge of cleanliness, that the world was a broken place without him in it.  
Not Newt.  
The Precursors.  
But that wasn’t him, and this wasn’t Hermann, and Newt - not Newt, not his Newt - was trying to end the world.  
Hermann once wanted to save the world. To understand it, then to save it, through numbers and chalk and metal and mesh and arguments over what was the best remedy for the millions of ills that came pouring through the split in the skin of the fragile, messy planet, and the world shrunk. Smaller and smaller. Cities got wiped off the map. People got wiped away too. Too many. And the more and more he failed the smaller and smaller the world got until he could admit the thing standing in the corner of his mind was there, was _right_. The world had shrunk.  
Hermann wanted to save the world.  
Hermann wanted to save the only person in it that still seemed to have a beating heart and the only person that seemed to mean anything at all.  
Hermann wanted to save Newt.  
Hermann cared about him, yes, but care was a blanket term to disguise a frightening and unusual specificity. Hermann loved him. Hermann had loved him since their first emails, had loved his fire, his idiosyncrasies, his drive to understand and to share, his glee, and everything Hermann had berated him for too, his messiness and his habits and his colloquialisms and his fondness. His soft edges and that spark in his eyes that wasn’t really stupidity at all, he was just too damn scared to call it its right name so he used every word besides _love_. Blind, crazy, heedless love for the world, unhindered by the logic Hermann clung to like a raft in a storm.   
And maybe some of that had been for him, and he realized he _wanted_ it. He wanted Newt to love him, explainably, understandably, clearly. It made sense when you put love in the equation. Hermann was in love with him.   
Hermann choked on his aspirations as he stared the fact right in the soulless face. He wanted Newt back.

And he got it. It wasn’t easy, but he could do it. Hours in an interrogation room and metal that wasn’t quite so friendly. But Hermann would save the world, _his_ world, the only way he knew how. He’d talk to Newt. It was what they’d done before. Now the arguments were a little different, and now, the familiar lab was utterly abandoned.   
It was the emails that finally did it. After weeks of fury and rage and a lot of bartering with Pentecost’s son, he’d turned to their old emails. Maybe nostalgia would jog his memory, maybe their first communications could bridge the gap.   
They did.  
Newt was out. Newt was safe.  
He was tired, he hurt, he needed a lot of therapy. But he was back. Hermann had saved the world.  
And the days rebuilding were shockingly easy as they fell back into their old routines, studying and calculating like they used to, as Hermann told him how much he’d missed him and then, eventually, after a lot of nervousness and attempts he gave up on, that he loved him. And then eventually, that he loved him the other, stronger, much more frightening way.  
Newt’s response was better than he could ever have imagined. It was unbelievable, really, how soft his lips were.  
And with that a few awkward exchanges, they were officially _together_. A lot of people won bets once the news got out.  
And after a year, another idea started burning in the back of Hermann’s mind, because who else could he ever spend his life with? The idea was loud, and Hermann was rather terrified to think it for fear that Newt might hear.  
He wanted to marry him.  
That conclusion was much faster and easier than Hermann had expected it to be. _Why waste any more time?_  
And a while later, box hidden carefully under a mass of papers that probably drew attention to the spot instead of dispersing it, Hermann drummed his fingers on the desk while Newt’s music blasted and he gently rocked to the beat to try and dispel the butterflies that must have turned to wasps as he formed his words in a way quiet enough to not alert Newt to them. Honestly, it was just a gamble. Newt was a better listener than he let on.   
Why waste any more time?  
He spent a full five minutes trying to open his mouth before he managed to choke out a “Newt?” _No going back now._ He grabbed the box.  
“Yeah?” He didn’t turn the music down, which made the prospect of talking a lot more difficult.   
“Listen, can I speak frankly?”  
“Why do you bother asking, Herm-“  
“You’re the most important person in the world to me. You always have been, and honestly, I can’t imagine where I’d be without you. Or if something happened, and- regardless, what I‘m trying to say is that I want to… I’d very much like to… being together is wonderful, and,” he found himself gesticulating with the box, _scheiße_ , and he’d just used 50 words when 4 would suffice, “I’d very much like to spend the rest of my life with-“  
Newt grabbed his face and pulled him into a long kiss. It _really_ was unfair that his lips were that soft. And that he was such a good kisser. And that he could read Hermann’s mind.  
“Yes.”  
“You didn’t let me finish.” Newton laughed and Hermann laughed much louder than he thought was probably appropriate but he had other things on his mind, namely how to take a knee.  
“Sure, go for it.”  
“Newton Geiszler, will you marry me?”  
“Yes.”  
And after 47 years, Hermann finally got what he wanted.

**Author's Note:**

> i do like my mean puns and i hope you did too


End file.
